There was quite a bit of talk about the Scouting open source software. The Emergency Preparedness project I'm working on has many of the same issues:
For our users, sometimes they may be online other times they may not be. I chose not to create a web application in order to avoid security concerns and to make installation easier. I make use of web services in my app. Currently, I just use the web services to do geocoding so I can add GIS capabilities, but I was thinking about using them for other things as well. It seems that at the heart of both of these apps and other potential LDS OSS apps, they do the same thing. They store information about some people in the ward and potentially people not in the ward and allow the users to edit the information. They may have other tools built on top of the basic functionality.
It would be nice to build a basic LDS-OSS system that was just a framework that took care of the common concerns of LDS applications, and then plugins could be built to address specific problems. The core system might for instance take care of reading information from MLS, interacting with an embedded database, printing, making installation and updating of the software easy, and who knows what else. Plugins might be added to store domain specific information(Boy Scout stuff versus Emergency Preparedness info, etc...), add GIS capabilities, sync with a database at Church Headquarters using web services, and whatever else would need to be added in the future. That way other apps could take advantage of the various plugins. Does anyone have interest/experience building this kind of plugin based system? What do people think?
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